Pans are an essential part of food preparation and in particular to the cooking and heating of ingredients. There are many shapes and sizes of pan ranging from a large frying pan to a small ‘milk’ pan with many iterations in between. These pans conventionally have a vessel to contain a certain level or volume of ingredients combined with a handle to assist with cooking, lifting and pouring and normally an accompanying lid for heat retention during cooking. When the pans are not in use they have to be stored away. This has traditionally been achieved in a number of ways: by either hanging the pans by their handles; stacking one on top of another where the lids, sometimes turned upside down, provide a platform for the next pan to stack onto; stacking the pans into each other, starting with the largest first, where the pan vessel collides with the handle of the smaller pan tipping it up and where the lids have to be stored independently. These storage methods either use up a lot of space or they create an untidy solution.
If there could be a solution that accommodated the lids and created an economic use of space where one pan, even with a lid in place, stacked into the next and so on, in a similar manner to ‘Russian dolls’, then this could not only have commercial benefits for minimising shipping and retail space but also provide the consumer with a space saving and tidy solution.